It’s wild that mobile game ripoffs this bad are allowed to exist
Oh neat, a new Witcher mobile game? That’s the only thing this cool piece of Geralt art (opens in new tab) I spotted on Reddit this morning could indicate.
The logo says it’s called Rise of the Kings and is apparently available on app stores everywhere. It wasn’t until scrolling down that I realized I was looking at yet another trashy mobile game that blatantly rips off other people’s artwork.
The offending artwork has clearly taken creative liberties with the design of its not-Geralt, mimicking actual art from The Witcher 3 while using the armor from the Netflix series. Dare I say, this swordsman’s face is even meant to mimic the impeccable Henry Cavill, a slight that PC Gamer cannot abide by (opens in new tab).
This Gerald of Riverboat ad is apparently promoting a Rise of the Kings update that’s been out for months, but it only recently caught the eye of r/Gaming. Commentators are having a laugh (opens in new tab) at the ad’s expense with some quality zingers. “Including everybody’s favourite card game, Qwert!” wrote drewtheblueduck. “His trusty steed, Coach,” added 8bit4brains.
“I think the Witcher ripped this game off,” said Crazescape.
Mobile ripoffs are so common at this point that it feels like a better use of our time to simply laugh them off than complain about them to an internet void. That said, if you’ll allow me to be annoyed by an already well-known problem outside of my control, it is absurd that these ripoffs continue to make money on major app stores.
For how much platforms like the Apple App Store pride themselves on vetting apps, theft is depressingly common. This update has been out since March! And Rise of the Kings isn’t some random sidebar ad game either. It has over 10 million downloads on the Google Play store alone, a stat I pulled from the game’s store page that currently autoplays a trailer starring fake Geralt.
It’d be nice to see these shady games get a long, costly timeout from storefronts when they do a theft, but considering Apple and Google automatically pocket up to 30% of everything Rise of the Kings makes, there isn’t a particularly strong incentive.
Perhaps the almost-Geralt here is something CD Projekt doesn’t feel it’s worth going after, or isn’t close enough to be cut-and-dry copyright infringement. If so, is it weird that these sorts of shady mobile games don’t take off in the same way on Steam? Valve’s hands-off publishing rules seem like a prime breeding ground for IP theft (and that certainly does happen), but games that do so don’t seem to attract 10 million players over six years. Maybe that’s because a lot of the time, trashy steam knockoffs are clearly more joke than business strategy (opens in new tab).
We’ve reached out to CDPR for comment and will update if we hear anything back.
